The Soldier’s Return to a Hollowed Vale
He treads the road of fractured stones, a specter clad in tattered bronze,
His boots, once honed for conquest’s march, now scrape the dust of silence.
The wind, a dirge through splintered pines, intones the village’s forgotten name—
A place where hearths once hymned the night, now choked by ivy’s claim.
Three winters past, he’d left these slopes, his breath a plume of youth’s defiance,
The drumbeat’s call, the banner’s blush, had carved his heart to blade’s sharp edge.
But war, that fickle alchemist, transmuted blood to rusted sediment,
And now he bears no trophy’s weight save memory’s leaden sediment.
The bridge that arched like a lover’s spine now sags beneath the void,
Each step a elegy for what the river’s tongue destroyed.
There, in the square where children spun like leaves in autumn’s reel,
A well gapes wide—a socket emptied of its sapphire keel.
He calls a name the wind devours, vowels frayed to phantom breath,
For in his pack, wrapped in a scarf still faint with lavender’s last sigh,
Lies a letter penned in sepia ink, unsent, unsigned, yet etched with *Wait*.
(Her hand had trembled, he recalls, as moths kissed the candle’s throat—
A night when promises were strewn like stars, too frail to stay afloat.)
The cottages, their timbers stooped as elders under grief’s cruel tax,
Echo with absence: looms stand mute, their threads unspooled to snakes,
A cradle rocks with no one’s hand, pushed by the guilt of rain.
He stumbles through the graveyard’s jaw, where markers bear no script,
And wonders if his own name’s etched where moss and mildew crypt.
A shadow stirs—not flesh, nor ghost, but something betwixt and thinned—
An echo of the blacksmith’s laugh, the baker’s flour-skinned grin.
They flicker, wraiths of pigment drained from war’s insatiable canvas,
Their eyes like tarnished silver coins, their voices ash on sand.
*“What news,”* they rasp, *“of foreign fields? Do poppies still drink deep?”*
*“What of the lark we sent with you? Does it wake where cannon’s sleep?”*
He proffers crumbs of battles won—a medal green as envy’s bile,
A dagger snapped in ambush’s womb, a lock of hair (not hers) in style.
But trophies mock the truth he masks: the lark within his breast
Fell mute when frost first kissed the trenches, its song entombed in ice.
The shadows sigh, dissolve to mist, as church bells toll no hour—
Their questions hang, like smoke uncurled from long-extinguished fire.
Northward he turns, where once a path coiled upward to the copse,
A place she swore no storm could touch, where wild orchids pledge their troth.
But thorns have claimed the pilgrim’s route, their claws devout and cruel,
Each laceration on his palms inscribes a merciless syllabic rule:
*Turn back. Turn back. No epilogue blooms here for those who’ve served the plot.*
Yet still he climbs, the soldier-scribe, carving psalms into the briar,
His blood the ink, his skin the scroll, each wound a desperate choir.
At crest’s bleak crown, he finds their oak—its trunk now split by heaven’s ire,
The hollow where she’d tucked her vows packed with snow’s counterfeit desire.
Dusk bleeds to night. The stars emerge—cold, disinterested surgeons—
Their light dissects the valley’s corpse, each home a ribcage picked of meaning.
He builds a pyre of splintered chairs, of shutters shredded by despair,
And feeds the flames the unread letter, its *Wait* now *Too Late* in the air.
The fire, a brief and fickle sun, licks the void with amber tongue,
Illuminating faces etched in smoke—all those he failed to outrun:
The boy who fell mid-charge, his cheeks still downed with peach’s blush,
The farmer turned to fodder, his scythe still clutched in August’s hush,
And her—not as she was, but as war’s distance made her seem:
A silhouette frayed at the edge, a requiem’s unfinished theme.
Dawn comes, a gray and listless thing. The soldier stirs from ash,
His uniform a second skin of grief’s indelible stain.
Downward he staggers, past the well, the square, the bridge’s ache,
Each landmark now a mirror held to all he can’t retake.
At the village edge, a figure waits—an crone with milky gaze,
Her shawl a tapestry of storms, her voice the scrape of rusted chains.
*“You seek the living,”* she intones, *“but tread the dead’s tableau.*
*The home you left was never home—a truth the wise outgrow.*
*Your maiden? Moonlight on a grave. Your peace? A ruse, a spark.*
*The only hearth that waits for you is here—”* her finger stabs his heart.
He laughs, a sound like shattering glass, and turns to face the road,
But something in the crone’s decree has shifted reason’s load.
The path ahead, once stark and straight, now spirals like a curse,
Each step erases what came before, each breath dissolves a verse.
The crows descend in brotherhoods, their feathers black as censored words,
They perch upon his shoulders, crown, their talons tender as the dirge.
*“Lead on,”* he murmurs, *“I’ll follow where the map of anguish ends.”*
They rise—a blot against the clouds—a migration without end.
Below, the village sheds its shape, a sand sketch kissed by tide,
No plaque, no ballad, no child’s rhyme will speak its name with pride.
And high above, where ice and void perform their slow divorce,
The soldier fades to rumor, a footnote in time’s coarse discourse.
Thus ends the tale of hope deferred, of valor’s pyrrhic bloom—
A man who marched to conquer fate, but found his tomb in roomless gloom.
Let this be writ in smoke and rust, in echoes’ brief salute:
The greatest battles leave no scars… save those no eye can compute.
